ROBERT MYERS
Professor, Department of English
American University of Beirut, New York, NY
A modern Syrian play set in nineteenth-century Damascus that includes the first overt and serious dramatization of homosexuality in Arab theater.
Saʿdallah Wannous (1941–1997), Syria's most prominent playwright and one of its most important contemporary intellectuals, is credited with reinventing the forms and themes of contemporary Arab theater by dramatizing the ills of traditional societies and authoritarian political systems. Tuqus al-isharat wa-al-tahawwulat (Rituals of signs and transformations), his most celebrated and multifaceted play, addresses themes such as clerical corruption, male homosexuality, male and female prostitution, suicide, and honor killing. Published in 1994, the printed edition of the play was freely available in Syria. However, when the play was first produced in Damascus in 2005 by a German-Syrian theater company, directed by Friederike Felbeck, the scenes about homosexuality were removed by censors.
Tuqus was first performed in Beirut in 1996 in a groundbreaking staging by the celebrated Lebanese actress and director Nidal al-Ashqar, who employed an idiosyncratic dramaturgical structure in which she placed the play's plotlines of psychological, spiritual, and sexual transformations side by side. In 2011 the play was performed at the American University in Cairo as a response to the sociopolitical turmoil in post–Hosni Mubarak Egypt after the so-called Arab Spring. In 2013 the Anglo-Kuwaiti playwright and director Sulayman Al Bassam directed the first French-language performance of the play at the Comédie-Française in Paris. Later that same year, Tuqus received its first English-language production by the American University of Beirut, directed by Sahar Assaf, which was followed by staged readings in New York and Chicago in 2014.
Wannous was born to an Alawite (a branch of Shiʿa Islam) family of peasants in a small village in northeastern Syria. At an early age, and contrary to his modest upbringing, he began to pursue an interest in literature, theater, culture, philosophy, and politics. He moved to Cairo at age nineteen to study journalism and graduated in 1963. After returning to Syria, he began writing short philosophical plays that were heavily influenced by existentialism and designed more for the page than the stage. These plays treated the tensions between the individual and society, especially the authoritarian state, a theme that continued to be a central concern of his work.
In the late 1960s he studied theater at the Sorbonne in Paris under the mentorship of Jean-Marie Serreau, a follower of Bertolt Brecht who directed plays by Luigi Pirandello, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, and the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine. After the disastrous Arab defeat by Israel in the June 1967 war, Wannous returned to Syria to join other intellectuals and artists who reacted strongly to the postwar government's censorship and manipulation of facts concerning the role of Arab governments in the defeat. His groundbreaking play Haflat samar min ajl al-khamis min huzyran (1968; An evening party for the fifth of June), strongly influenced by Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, was a manifesto for his new “theater of politicization,” which he believed would be a powerful tool to expose corrupt Arab regimes, engage the audience, and promote political change. “Theater of politicization” consisted of interactive plays that combined Brechtian techniques and elements of Arab folk culture such as the figure of the hakawati (storyteller), live music, and traditional songs. Mughamarat ras al-Mamluk Jabir (1970; The adventure of the head of Mamluk Jabir), a play about personal ambition and treason, is arguably the most powerful of his political dramas from the 1960s and 1970s. Other significant plays from this period include the Brechtian fables Al-Fil ya malik al-zaman (1969; The King's elephant) and Al-Malik huwa al-malik (1977; The King is the king).
The peace process with Israel that led to the Camp David Accords, signed in 1978, which was supported by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, marked a turning point in the Arab world and in Wannous's life and career. Like many Arab intellectuals, he viewed the peace process with Israel as another political capitulation by an Arab leader and a betrayal of the Palestinians. In part because of what he perceived as Sadat's treachery in visiting Jerusalem, Wannous sank into a depression and attempted suicide. Although he continued to work in the theater, founding and directing the High Dramatic Institute in Damascus, he stopped writing plays for more than ten years.
The second phase of Wannous's career began soon after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer in the early 1990s. His response to the disease was to write “frenziedly for the theatre” (quoted and translated in al-Anezi 2006, 219), and he adopted a new approach to playwriting in which he shifted from his earlier overtly political and programmatic Brechtian style to one more focused on personal psychology and individual suffering. In a 1992 interview, he admitted that before his diagnosis he had thought “that individual strife or personal idiosyncrasies were inessential, shallow bourgeois matters that should be set aside” (quoted and translated in Wannous 2019). He also stated that although he continued to see the role of the intellectual as primarily critical, he believed the new approach he had adopted was “more beneficial than my miserable attempts to struggle and immerse myself in political affairs on a daily basis, or to disseminate readymade ideas, definitive theories and flamboyant slogans” (quoted and translated in Wannous 2019).
Tuqus al-isharat wa-al-tahawwulat, more than any of the half-dozen works Wannous wrote between 1992 and 1997, represents a clear shift in his theatrical language from the political to the personal. In the play Wannous introduces themes he had previously ignored, such as mysticism, female sexual freedom, sexual abuse, and male homosexual love. The play celebrates individual liberation and transformation—whether in the form of mystic fervor, sexual pleasure, or publicly assuming one's gay identity—while at the same time serving as a cautionary tale about the terrible price one pays for acting on one's deepest desires in traditional and corrupt authoritarian societies.
The prominence of the theme of self-actualization and transformation in Tuqus is best characterized by Wannous's note for the play's Beirut production. In it he writes that while writing Tuqus “a spring of feelings suddenly welled up inside me” that “overwhelmed me,” adding that “the characters' choices and transformations were not merely actions I created … according to a specific scheme; they and I were connected in an electrical field” (quoted and translated in al-Anezi 2006, 250–251). Wannous's identification with the “frightful and [intoxicating] … nakedness” (251) of his characters in Tuqus marks a rupture with his previous ubiquitous authorial voice and his preoccupation with human experience defined principally in terms of political power and economic forces.
Although Tuqus was inspired by a historical incident in nineteenth-century Damascus and is set in that period, the play is generally seen as an allegory dramatizing the dilemmas of Syria and the Arab world in the 1990s. The play's structural division into two parts, “Conspiracies” and “Outcomes,” evokes both Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, in which the actions of the characters in the first part determine their fate in the second. Tuqus begins with the police chief, ʿIzzat, surprising ʿAbdallah, the naqib (head of the city's nobility) and a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, frolicking in his private garden with his mistress, the prostitute Warda, who is wearing his clerical attire and riding on his back. ʿIzzat proceeds to arrest the couple and parade them through the streets of Damascus to expose ʿAbdallah's immoral behavior. ʿAbbas and ʿAfsa, bodyguards of the Mufti, the highest local religious authority and a rival of ʿAbdallah, inform the Mufti of his enemy's public humiliation. Although he secretly enjoys the news, the Mufti pretends to the bodyguards to be dismayed by their mocking account of the shaming of a fellow religious official. He concocts a scheme to replace Warda, who occupies the same prison cell as ʿAbdallah, with his wife, Muʾmina, and arrest the police chief for his arrest of ʿAbdallah for making love with his own wife. Muʾmina, herself the daughter of an influential cleric and a sophisticated, well-read woman, agrees to the Mufti's theatrical scheme in exchange for his agreeing to grant her a divorce from ʿAbdallah. The women are exchanged for one another in the prison cell, Warda is ushered out in Muʾmina's clothing, and the police chief is soon arrested. As happens repeatedly in the play, the change of characters' costumes and appearance augurs radical changes in their lives as latent desires are made manifest.
Muʾmina's choice and transformation are transgressive and extreme. She changes her name to Almasa (meaning “diamond”), becomes a celebrated, high-end prostitute, and enjoys the power and sensuality her sexual freedom confers on her. After her liberation, which arouses the city's males––including the professedly pious Mufti who, having issued a fatwa (a ruling based on Islamic law issued by a clerical authority) calling for her death, falls in love with her—she lends her name to perfumes, jewelry, and teas. Her ex-husband, ʿAbdallah, converts to Sufism and fancies himself a Sufi saint, while officials and business leaders fight to regain control of the city from the frenzy of immorality unleashed by Almasa's transformation. Her father chastises her for her lascivious conduct, but she defiantly rebuffs him, reminding him that he molested young women in their house, including Warda. He renounces Almasa/Muʾmina, and her younger brother, Safwan, attempting to prove his manhood by restoring the family's honor, stabs her, but as she dies she tells him his act is futile: “I am a tale, Safwan, and a tale can't be killed” (Myers and Saab 2014, 392).
Although ʿAfsa, one of the Mufti's two bodyguards, appears at first glance to be a secondary character, he is arguably Wannous's most “astonishing creation” (al-Anezi 2006, 257). His actions and transformation echo and surpass those of Muʾmina. Although he has a reputation as one of the strongest men in Damascus, he enters into a sexual relationship with his fellow bodyguard, ʿAbbas, and upon being rejected, commits suicide. The story of the relationship of ʿAfsa and ʿAbbas is the first overt and serious dramatization of homosexuality in Arab theater. While the play's rendering of these two characters draws on many aspects of social reality in Syria and other parts of the contemporary Arab world, such as the pervasive erotic relationships between men who may officially be heterosexual, it directly challenges traditional social practices in which overt acknowledgment or acceptance of nontraditional sexual practices or gender roles is generally met with swift social censure.
In ʿAfsa, Wannous creates an entirely new kind of character, a hypermasculine yet “passive” homosexual who is transformed by his desire to become completely submissive to and openly proclaim his affection for his lover, ʿAbbas. ʿAfsa's desire to publicly embrace what he desires erotically and who he sees himself to be stands in stark defiance of a homoerotic culture frequently marked by stealth, in which homosexuals are either “dominant” bisexuals or seen as “passive,” feminized, lewd, and perverse. In scene 3 of part 1, in which ʿAfsa and ʿAbbas are interrupted by Simsim, an effeminate male prostitute, Wannous––whose political theater promoted vigorous interaction with the audience––forces the spectators to look at eroticized male bodies and listen to charged, titillating language about sex between men. Simsim tries to seduce the manly ʿAbbas by saying he is not interested in “lion's milk”—that is, a proffered glass of araq—but rather desires ʿAbbas's “milk,” Arabic slang for “semen.” Simsim, who is apparently a former sexual partner of ʿAfsa, also suggests to ʿAbbas that there is no difference between Simsim and ʿAfsa, who, infuriated at being outed, violently attacks Simsim, forcing ʿAbbas to intervene. ʿAbbas warns Simsim to keep silent about what he has revealed, and after he has left, ʿAbbas tells ʿAfsa that they will now have a new relationship, which will remain secret, in which ʿAfsa will be like one of his women whom he will protect. “We will,” says ʿAbbas, “have our appearance and our reality” (Myers and Saab 2014, 292).
ʿAfsa, who is relieved that ʿAbbas does not reproach him and pleased that he is willing to accept ʿAfsa's affection, initially agrees to ʿAbbas's condition that they remain secret lovers, but as ʿAfsa's love for ʿAbbas deepens, he refuses to live a life of appearances and enacts his own transformation. He reveals what he asserts is his true self by stripping his body of the signs of masculinity in Arab cultures—his moustache and body hair. Scene 3 of part 2 is perhaps the play's most poignant and cruel. ʿAfsa assumes a feminized posture as he walks intently toward ʿAbbas, offering him his shaved moustache, a sign of his sexual transformation, and his depilated body, which he believes will please his lover. ʿAbbas harshly rejects him: “You disgust me. You're nothing but a lecherous leech who's attached himself to me” (Myers and Saab 2014, 337). He had, he says, desired ʿAfsa's masculine appearance and asserts that there is “no such thing as love between men…. What was between us was lust that fades when satisfied. It gives me pleasure to mount someone so strong, to see his body break between my thighs. But what pleasure can I get now from mounting a shameless swish?” (Myers and Saab 2014, 339). ʿAbbas, who enjoys same-gender sex as a means to assert his power and physically dominate another male, is, however, promptly challenged. In place of a goodbye, ʿAfsa demands that the two men engage in a final arm wrestling contest, which ends in a draw, an outcome that infuriates ʿAbbas. In part 2, scene 7, the play's shortest, the tragic results of quests for authentic self-expression in Tuqus and in traditional societies are crystallized in ʿAfsa's final monologue as he prepares to kill himself: “What a wicked world this is in which only forgers and liars thrive” (Myers and Saab, 2014, 358).
ʿAfsa is a tragic hero who is prepared to be publicly humiliated and endure abuse to become his true self. Unlike Almasa, however, he does not wield the power of seduction. His struggle is seemingly in vain, and his story ends in self-annihilation, but it is dramatized in crude, raw language whose effect on the audience is far more profound than the poetic language used by Almasa, which suggests that she is “partly a symbolic figure, a goddess of … sexuality” (al-Anezi 2006, 258).
Prior to its first English translation in 2013, studies of Tuqus were conducted by Syrian scholars who interviewed Wannous and later traveled to England to pursue doctoral degrees. Although their English-language dissertations offer valuable documentation of and insights about the playwright's career and works, they have remained unpublished in book form. One of the first analyses of the play that focuses on Wannous's dramatization of male homosexuality is Ali al-Souleman's 2005 Oxford University dissertation. He notes that Arab reviewers largely avoided discussing the scenes featuring ʿAfsa and ʿAbbas and asserts that Tuqus was written during a period of transition in Arab societies that was marked by instability, the decline of traditional institutions such as tribe and family, and the emergence of the modern state. This transition provided the social and historical context for Wannous's vivid portrayals of individuals trapped between traditional and emerging orders as they struggled to actualize their impulses, desires, and choices.
Ali Ali ʿAjil Naji al-Anezi's 2006 dissertation offers a detailed and eloquent reading of ʿAfsa and ʿAbbas's scenes, in which he emphasizes the centrality of ʿAfsa's story to the play and fiercely challenges accepted notions of homosexuality prevalent in Arab societies. He criticizes a moral code that tolerates undisclosed homosexuality and causes same-gender relationships to be fleeting, clandestine, abusive, and defined by power. In Tuqus, the dominant and abusive figure is obviously ʿAbbas, who takes pleasure in controlling ʿAfsa's submissive masculine body. Al-Anezi sees ʿAfsa's transformation—his willingness to give up the signs of his masculine identity—as a challenge to social hypocrisy and an assertion of the nature of his love and his body. He describes the scene in which ʿAfsa offers his moustache to ʿAbbas as “one of the most touching Wannous ever wrote” and one in which the prejudices of the audience are openly confronted (258).
An opposing and polemical analysis of Wannous's dramatization of homosexuality is offered by Joseph A. Massad in his 2007 book Desiring Arabs. Although Massad points to the fluidity of gender and sexuality in the Arab world, particularly as portrayed by medieval writers, as a powerful rebuke to hegemonic Western sexual norms, he rejects as essentialist and colonialized the notion that sexual mores and practices construct identity. He does admit that the putative Arab tolerance of homosexuality is exaggerated, but he chastises Arab artists and intellectuals for being either moralistic in their treatment of same-gender sex or replicating Westernized notions of gay identity and rights. In his critique of Tuqus, Massad incisively points to the Shakespearean echoes in the play's plot and structure, such as the reversals of roles, the disguising of characters, and “the centrality of desire and public sexual conduct” (353). His insight into Wannous's dramaturgy is, however, complicated by his indictment of the playwright for using “ready-made and uninterrogated Western formulae”—that is, feminism, gay liberation, and sexual identity—to critique the Arab world (375).
In a 2013 article on the representation of homosexuality in modern Arab literature, Khalid Hadeed counters Massad's assumption that Arab homosexuality is part of culturally specific sexual codes and endorses the “right to enjoy wide-scale social visibility and legitimacy” and “the freedom to choose a person of the same sex as a life partner” (272). He also critiques, however, what he identifies as Wannous's faulty “representational logic,” which, he asserts, correlates homosexual identity with male dominance (274). For Hadeed, ʿAfsa's transformation “via the language of interiority and essence he deploys to express himself” paradoxically establishes “masculinity as the natural outcome of male sexual development” (274).
A distinct approach to the tragedy of ʿAfsa is offered in two studies of Tuqus published in Theatre Research International in 2013. The first is by Margaret Litvin, who discusses the significance of the Cairo performance of Tuqus in late 2011 after the fall of Mubarak. Litvin attributes the play's relevance in times of political instability and anxiety to its “spectacular pessimism” (120). She sees ʿAfsa's suicide after “performatively disclosing his homosexual love for his colleague” (121) as the result of the pervasive political and gender domination in patriarchal societies.
In the second study, Robert Myers and Nada Saab enlarge on Massad's insights about the Shakespearean elements of Tuqus, further map the evolution of Wannous's drama, and explore a neglected but prominent component of the play, Sufism, including its role in political dissent and its mystic theology of revelation and sacrifice. The authors see ʿAfsa's failed attempt to reconcile his inner and outer selves as a metonymic, “profane” transformation that mirrors various Sufi rituals.
Despite the contrasting approaches used in the English-language studies of Wannous, critics and scholars view the radical and tragic metamorphoses the characters undergo in Tuqus in their struggle to defy a corrupt and oppressive order as prefiguring the collapse of Wannous's own nation and as a testament to his profound belief in theater as both a manifestation of civil society and a mechanism for its transformation (Saab 2014).
SEE ALSO Halat Shaghaf (1998; Nihad Sirees); Homoeroticism in the Plays of Ibn Daniyal; Theater, Queer
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Anezi, Ali Ali ʿAjil Naji al-. “An Analytical Study of the Theatre of the Syrian Playwright Saadallah Wannous, with Particular Emphasis on the Plays Written after the 1967 War.” PhD diss., University of Sheffield, UK, 2006. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3080/1/434995.pdf
Hadeed, Khalid. “Homosexuality and Epistemic Closure in Modern Arabic Literature.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 271–291.
Houssami, Eyad, ed. Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
Litvin, Margaret. “From Tahrir to ‘Tahrir’: Some Theatrical Impulses toward the Egyptian Uprising.” Theatre Research International 38, no. 2 (2013): 116–123.
Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Myers, Robert, and Nada Saab. “Sufism and Shakespeare: The Poetics of Personal and Political Transformation in Saʿdallah Wannus's Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat.” Theatre Research International 38, no. 2 (2013): 124–136.
Myers, Robert, and Nada Saab, trans. Rituals of Signs and Transformations. By Saʿdallah Wannous. In Four Plays from Syria, edited by Marvin Carlson and Safi Mahfouz, 267–393. New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2014.
Saab, Nada. Translator's preface to Rituals of Signs and Transformations. By Saʿdallah Wannous. In Four Plays from Syria, edited by Marvin Carlson and Safi Mahfouz, 249–266. New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2014.
Souleman, Ali al-. “From Staging the World to Staging the Self: Saʿdallāh Wannūs and the Question of Theatre.” PhD diss., Oxford University, 2005.
Wannous, Saʿdallah. Sentence to Hope. Edited and translated by Robert Myers and Nada Saab. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.
Ziter, Edward. Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.